Overview

Dropbox provides a powerful, well known and ready made environment for working with Research Objects (ROs). It is one of many possible environments we can integrate with, but one that we can use to quickly build a prototype around to then elicit user feedback and requirements and evolve the architecture.

For the first prototype, we intend to use Dropbox as the user facing interface for depositing and working with ROs.

Proposed Design

We may want to initially password protect this application whilst we trial it out with our core users.

Overall

Users can log in through their Dropbox accounts. The first time this is done, ROBox will store the OAuth tokens for the user's Dropbox so that background synchronisation takes place.

Users can then register their ROs folder (see below for more details).

ROBox will then continually monitor this folder for new and updated ROs and handle synchronisation - changes will be pushed to the RO SRS and updates from the RO SRS will be pulled back into the user's Dropbox folder.

The RO SRS Client Ruby Gem (being developed as part of the ROBox work) will be used to interact with the RO SRS service.

After the first sync, a Dashboard is accessible to the user. Here the user can see the status of their Dropbox ROs folder and see summary information on their ROs.

What else is needed for the Dashboard? We will work with users to find out.

A Getting Started wizard-like page helps the user go through this process. See below for a screenshot:

Development & Deployment Instructions

Potential Issues

The Dropbox API does not provide adequate capabilities for synchronisation use cases. They say they are working on this. See for example this forum thread: Use of the API for desktop applications

Message from Dropbox staff

Icon

Jiten, web apps are fine. That said, we don't recommend attempting to build apps that do synchronization on the API right now. We haven't yet released primitives that make syncing work in a 100%-robust way.

Due to the issue raised above (re: synchronisation), we will have to poll the Dropbox API (but not too frequently!) and check for changes. To aid in this, the metadata about a directory contains a hash field that changes whenever the contents of the directory change. The API can return back an HTTP 304 when the metadata hasn't changed. See the API doc for this. BUT NOTE:this only tells you when the flat list of files within the directory has changed and does not take into account any nested directories. See this forum thread for more info: iOS: metada hash - strange behavior

What happens when a user renames/changes their base ROs folder in their Dropbox account?